In particular, the present disclosure relates to a system and method for managing digital certificates on a remote device.
The present disclosure relates generally to using a computerized workstation to manage digital certificates on remote devices, such as printers. The digital certificates are used for providing secure data transfers to and from the remote devices using a secure interface protocol such as SSL.
The digital certificates use public and private keys. A computerized device's public key is available to other computerized devices, but its private key is only available to itself. A first computerized device sending secure data to a second computerized device may encrypt the data using the second device's public key, and the data may only be decrypted by using the second device's private key, which only the second device has access to. Furthermore, a device's private key may be used to generate a digital signature for securing a document. For additional security, the first device may be provided with a digital certificate which is signed by a certifying authority, thus authenticating the digital certificate. The digital certificate associated with a device uses the private and public keys associated with that device. A device receiving data with a digital certificate uses the public key provided with the digital certificate to decrypt the data.
Presently, remote devices can be configured with digital certificates in a number of ways. In one method, the digital certificate for each remote device is created and stored on the remote device manually, such as by way of a system administrator manually receiving and entering the necessary data from the remote device. In another method, proprietary software, such as scripts, are generated for use with a network, where a computerized workstation communicates with the remote devices for managing their respective associated digital certificates. The software is specially developed for use with the operating system employed by the computerized workstation, for the specific applications used by the workstation and/or the remote devices, and the specific computer languages used by the workstation and/or the remote devices. The software developed for managing the digital certificates may not work on a system that uses a different operating system, different applications or different computer languages.
Still another method presently used is Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), which here refers to a method using software developed for managing certificates on remote devices via a computerized workstation. However, the software is extremely difficult to implement and is not widely used in the industry.
To overcome the drawbacks in the prior art, it is an aspect of the present disclosure to provide a system and method, which is relatively simple to use, for managing digital certificates on remote devices using a computerized workstation, where the system and method is universal and is not sensitive to the particular operating system used by the workstation or the computer language or applications used by the workstation and/or remote devices.